Now, if we had that fiber line coming into the building that I’d wanted us to put in, you know, just in case we needed to eventually upgrade to a gigabit link… Then it’s just a matter of caps coming in on the line anyway and in theory they should be able to do that. Of course at that point we’d be spending so much money with them each month they’d probably be more flexible with our requests (demands?). We got a new toy (some cool KVM switches) that we’re in the process of re-wiring into our racks, so I haven’t put much more thought into the backup solution yet, but I think the cheap drives in the crap extra machine is going to be the only viable alternative.

With some luck, it could get expanded into a bunch of removable drives that could be swapped in and out on a regular basis. But we’ll cross that $1,000 bridge when we come to it.

Thanks for the sounding board, guys. Let me know if you get anything else.

I am not sure if this idea is viable, but cant you contact your ISP to remove uplink caps to the offsite server. That way, you’ll be able to upload the backups at the maximum speed possible by your operator and since the backup server is in the same town, there wont be any excess international bandwidth charges.

If I get any more revelations, I will let them appear over here

On the plus side, if we had the live backup system going, we could focus the tapes more on off-site backups and monkey with that process some to more accomodate that need (rather than trying to juggle full backups while keeping the latest copy locally, but also having a pretty recent copy off-site and so forth).

At the very least, it would make the “Oh shit, I didn’t mean to click yes to delete that!” scenarios a lot easier to recover from… And the same for the random drag-and-drop “Akk, where’d it go?!” incidents (my god are those common around here… how stupid can you be?).

I hadn’t really explored the idea of the removable drives in the backup PC. We’d have to change our system of keeping one copy off site every month (which really, seems very paranoid to me - 12 backups a year off-site?), but if the idea was to simply keep *a* copy of our recent data (once a week) off-site until it was replaced the next week, we’d really only need a few extra drives to maintain the rotation. A couple of enclosures and a TrueCrypt install later, we’ve got our encrypted removable drives.

Hmm, I shall explore the options further. If anyone else has bright ideas (epiphanies?) please don’t keep it to yourselves…

See how long he keeps it up, especially as he then has to remember to bring the disks in to keep the rotation going… You might just get that new file server.

After that I’m fresh out of ideas at the moment.

Performing full backups every night was a conscious decision on our part to help keep things simple. We’ve got untrained operations people (read: computer morons) swapping tapes and doing other menial day-to-day tasks of that sort. If we were to do a full backup today, then do only differentials from now on, we would eventually get to the point where the tape would fill up and sprout and error and send these idiots into an utter panic when something doesn’t “look right”. I would then instantly have to drop whatever I was doing and assist them and reassure them it was really alright, that we knew this would happen eventually. At which point, they would then proceed to insist in the future that I don’t know what I’m doing and that any future issues are obviously related to this one. In the end, we established it was much easier for everyone involved if we just did full backups every night, particularly to avoid confusion as to which copies should go off-site (with full backups every night, it doesn’t matter - pick one out of the stack).

I suppose online backups would be at least feasible at this point, but with only 150kb/s upload speeds, it just wouldn’t work. Now that I actually run some numbers in my head, it’s even more out of the question than it was before:

Oracle backups - ~4gb x 2
Exchange backup - 14gb (last I checked)
Updates server backup - 10gb (again, last I checked)

There’s more, but we can round off to 30gb for these purposes. At 160kb/s upload, we’re talking about 2 days. Again we’d run into problems doing incrementals of all that stuff (particularly things like Exchange).

So once again we’re back to a local on-site hardware solution… Any other ideas?

Oh, and Tomas, Jeffry and Pah said they were out of stock… Blasted Chief. I think he’s secretly trying to corner the market so he can launch his own brand of MonkeyTapes.

For anyone else wondering what the hell I was just talking about, go read The Case of the Tepid Tipster, one of everyone’s favorite blogs.

(Think about it).

Why are you using 2 tapes a night? Aren’t you doing a GFS (Grandfather, father, son) schedule, and only backing up changes? This also makes it quicker to find that 20kb file.

As for offsite, it you are only backing up the changes, it won’t take too long to shove that over the internet to somewhere each night will it?